Cities & Their Territories Final Paper

Name:
Professor:
Course:
Date:
Cities and their Territories
Infrastructure used should be left in the hands of the professionals that are engineers and architects. The function to handle infrastructure was strict to them and government needed an exclusive realm of professional to plan for the same. However, the time has struck down this theory and today we have to involve more than the architects and engineers when planning, be it landscape or urbanism, the two professionals are no longer enough. Today, more social, political, economic, and technological factors have increased challenges to the urban planners who not only need to meet the demand of the increased population and space available but also look at the deteriorating environment. There are so many aspects to consider as a planner and this is giving architects hard time when trying to comply with all the new regulations and as well make space available viable. To come up with something solid and viable, the budget has to enough, there must be compliance with the environmental regulation and today these regulations are becoming more and more stringer. There need to carefully factor technology aspect of it too. Today technology is improving at a very fast rate and hence the planners and architects need to consider future technology. This paper is going to examine the future landscape and urbanism.
Looking at a more traditional approach of what urbanism means then one can clearly see the confusion that lies in the inquiry of design versus planning. As this paper hope to determine what the future holds for urbanism and landscape, and then the idea of urbanism requires looking at the function of the cities in their economic, sociological, and ecological situations rather than just a strategy for action. There is a need to recognize that urban is no longer a dense area of agglomeration anymore. As we aim to look at the future holding, then we have to project on the humanistic, alternative and sustainable forms of landscapes, urbanism and future cities by addressing the key humanistic issues of the ecological urbanism. How they will be organized, the role played by the planning and design in landscape architecture. There is also need to look at whether the new, old and the shrinking cities can be sustained and be socially included to get the real meaning of ecology beyond the mere environmental aspect but also to include the political, social, and cultural.
Planners and designers have the capabilities to use and imagine better futures of the urban landscape for the new coming up cities, population-shrinking cities and the old cities. Planners and designers have been forced to assume a more speculative posture which has led to imagination of better environmental futures due to the pressure of current global conditions which include and not limited to, climate change, urban population densification, aggressive disasters of outbreaks, biodiversity loss, social inequality, public health, social freedoms, biopolitical knowledge and technological advancement. Discussion on ecology urbanism will aid in putting into perspective the development and ecological crisis and the respective planning and design response.
In general, among the disciplines of landscape and design, landscape architecture comes on as one of the generative and elusive. The phenomenon concerns culture and space and currently, the word landscape is placed in tremendous currency in fields of advanced knowledge which range from technical to every day and low brow. Today, designs are being built in accordance with the environment and this is common in the modern city where the great focus is being placed on the consciousness of the public at large. Landscape architects ought to be capable of putting very high standards on the future cities and at the same time implement a more humanistic, beautiful, socially enriched, and ecologically sound environments. The most profound challenge today is to be able to create an integrated transit infrastructure that will rethink the relationship between industry, home and nature and at the same time try to escape the old-fashioned fashionable purview professional urban expertise. Many have failed to address the said issues because of one thing or the other but the future demands of the same and designers and planners have strategies to get there as per the future wants.
Landscape Architecture
Landscape architecture as a separate professional was initiated in the 19th century and was motivated by the thought of what an ideal American city. At the time, New York was a place of great attractions, vibrancy, and productivity yet it had no much social amenities like most cities in North America. The larger public debate issues include that of having parks and public open space to address the social evil. These amenities were to include, botanical gardens, libraries and schools. Landscape architecture was oriented publically as a profession in 1959 when Olmsted and Vaux won the central park competition; their passion to have a new park as a way of reaching the social agenda led to landscape architecture. Boston City owes its makeover to Charles Eliot who came up with a genius way of articulating a physical and conceptual framework to preserve scenic resources and remnant wildlands. His contribution came around the same time when technology was making major shifts in relation to social order and city making together with the rapid population increase, which reshaped the national landscape.
What will the future be like for the cities?
According to Picone (2) our cities are on the brink of a radical transformation and the intelligence involved is only comparable to that brought about by industrialization. Smart city, which are driven by technology, are being proposed and some have been initiated already, this trend will replace the traditional city that was built out of hard infrastructure. Not only will technology takes over soil, water roads, and sanitation will also influence political and social projects. In general, it is almost obvious that in future diverse green spaces and built spaces will be of essentially same value interface. The central importance aspects will be natural systems and human uses of the same systems in the urban regions.
Ecological Urbanism
Urbanism seems to begin at our living spaces starting by the water we drink, the car we drive, the food we eat as they all have their three-dimensional origin and results. Thus urbanism is a simultaneous process that begins on a regional level and then global. It is estimated that almost half of the 6 billion people that live on earth are in urban cen...